A Practitioner’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing: Accelerating Growth in Strategic Accounts by Bev Burgess and Dave Munn
Dave Munn is President and CEO of ITSMA a research-based community for B2B marketing leaders that pioneered the account-based marketing approach in the early 2000s.
Prior to joining ITSMA in 1995 Dave held senior level marketing positions with Oracle and Apple, and was a senior analyst at the Ledgeway Group (now part of Gartner) a research firm that laid the foundation for the growth of technology services business research in the 1990s.
And, interesting fact: he is an avid outdoorsman and lover of history.
The Host’s Perspective:
So what is account based marketing?
The authors explain that it’s essentially treating individual accounts as markets in their own right, and then acting with all the tools of marketing to position your company and its services with the aim of ultimately acquiring the greater share of your client’s business and earning their continuing loyalty.
This quote by David Ogilvy nicely sums it up: “Don’t count the people you reach; reach the people who count.”
The dramatic rise of account based marketing in the last few years reflects growing recognition of its business impact. In a 2016 benchmarking survey conducted by ITSMA, 84% of marketers measuring their ROI reported that account based marketing delivered higher returns than any other B2B marketing approach.
But account based marketing is more fundamental than a redrawing of marketing plans. It shifts the focus of your marketing attention from inside out to outside in, starting with your customer and their problems, then working back to your own company and how it can help to solve those problems.
And it doesn’t work without buy-in from the entire business – one of the reasons account based marketing efforts fail is when it is positioned as a tactical marketing program that does not have the support and collaboration beyond the marketing department.There’s lots of nuts and bolts ‘how to’ in the book – it shows how to build, manage and develop a successful account based marketing strategy, from getting key stakeholders on board and aligned with sales, to measuring metrics that matter.
Also, the book provides case studies from the most successful account based marketing practitioners from companies including Cisco, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, SAP and several others.
After reading the book you’ll know what account based marketing is, how to tell if it’s a fit for your company and how to successfully implement it.
Listen to the Interview:
Show Notes
A Practitioner’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing: Accelerating Growth in Strategic Accounts by Bev Burgess and Dave Munn
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath
Impossible to Ignore by Carmen Simon (Marketing Book Podcast interview)
Buyer’s Persona by Adele Revella (Marketing Book Podcast interview)
Publisher’s Website (KoganPage.com)
About A Practitioner’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing… (itsma.com/abmbook)
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